Look what happened to poor Andrew RT Davies, the leader of the Welsh Conservatives, during his mid-morning speech at Tory party conference this month. He intended to cry, “We WILL make Brexit a success!” Instead he cried, “We WILL make breakfast a success!”

Still, at least he only did it once. In a speech in London at 11 o’clock this morning – that dangerous hour, when the blood sugar is running low and the stomach is starting to growl – Labour’s John McDonnell did it not once, not twice, but three times.

Watch | Welsh Tory leader: We will make breakfast a success

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“The Government,” glowered the shadow chancellor, “is hurtling towards a chaotic breakfast.” Less than two minutes later, he warned the nation that “a chaotic breakfast will lead to job losses”. (Presumably in brasseries and greasy spoon cafes.)

Then, three minutes after that – during a passage attacking the notion of an elitist, free-market “bankers’ Brexit” – he argued that Conservative voters “don’t want a bankers’ breakfast any more than I do”.

Three times in five minutes. The poor man must have been starving.

John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, speaking at The Institute of Mechanical Engineers in LondonCredit:
EPA/WILL OLIVER

Personally, while I share the shadow chancellor’s misgivings about the prospect of a chaotic breakfast, I would query his assertion about the appetites of Conservative voters. I suppose it depends on what exactly a bankers’ breakfast consists of.

I would imagine it to be a lavish affair: teetering logpiles of the finest sausages, king-sized rashers of sumptuous bacon, a skyscraper of blueberry waffles cascading with syrup, and all washed down with a bottle or two of exquisitely chilled Pol Roger champagne.

Equally, of course, it could just be a triple espresso and four lines of coke. Either way, I suspect it would have more public appeal than Mr McDonnell gives it credit for.

What the shadow chancellor was trying to say, amid all this muddle, was that the Government had to get its act together. “It’s absolute chaos at the moment,” he said. “This is chaos.”

Within the last hour, a journalist pointed out, it had been announced that the economy had grown faster than expected, and that Nissan – thanks to what its chief executive called the Government’s “support and assurance” – had decided to build two new models of car at its plant in Sunderland.

Mr McDonnell stuck to his guns. “This approach is chaotic,” he said. “There’s no coherence to it.”

This, of course, is in sharp contrast to the consistency of Mr McDonnell’s approach, which is to keep saying the word “chaos” over and over, irrespective of whether the news is good or bad.

I’m not knocking it. I’m a big believer in pessimism. Keep predicting things will go wrong, and sooner or later you’re bound to be proven right.